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Tag: Channel 4

You don’t get quite the same production values in things like C5’s How the Victorians Built Britain but you don’t get the PC bollocks of Bodyguard and King Arthur’s Britain

Richard Madden in Bodyguard

What a load of utter tripe Bodyguard (BBC1, Sundays) was. Admittedly, I came to it late having missed all the sex scenes with Keeley Hawes and Robb Stark, which may have dazzled me in the way they seem to have dazzled many impressionable viewers.Sex scenes in TV drama are a bit like the chaff used by fighters to distract radar-guided missiles. You’re so busy feeling simultaneously awkward and embarrassed and half-titillated, covering your eyes with your fingers, wishing your other half wasn’t watching with you because then it would be proper porn and you could enjoy it, that you sometimes forget to notice what convoluted, implausible tosh the surrounding drama is.

The BBC isn’t any better – with one honourable exception: the Daily/Sunday Politics and This Week, which of course the BBC have decided to cancel.

Sebastian Gorka (image: Getty)

When President Trump refused to take a question from a CNN reporter at the Chequers press conference last week, I imagine a lot of British viewers thought —as Theresa May clearly did — that he was being graceless, capricious and anti-freedom of speech.

But I think we’re in danger of underestimating the extent to which the media landscape has changed in the past few years. Gone are the days — if they ever existed — when political interviewers were dispassionate seekers-after-truth on a mission to get the best out of their subjects. Now, it’s mostly activism-driven, the aim being to advance your preferred narrative while showing up your ideological opponents in as unflattering a light as possible. When someone sincerely believes you are a shit and their only purpose is to persuade everyone else that you’re a shit, why would you choose to grant them that opportunity?

Greenies are up in arms over another environmental scandal of their own making. A TV documentary, shown on Britain’s left-wing Channel 4, has been shocked to discover that old hardwood forests in the U.S. are being chopped down, exported to the UK and burned for what is laughably being billed as “green” energy.

Huge areas of hardwood forest in the state of Virginia are being chainsawed to create ‘biomass’ energy in Britain as the government attempts to reach targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in efforts to tackle climate change, an investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches has found.

A key part of government efforts to hit its green energy targets is to switch from generating electricity from burning coal to burning wood – or so-called biomass. It’s a policy that is costing taxpayers more than £700 million per year through a levy on their electricity bills.

Well fancy that. Enviroloons caught once again killing the planet in order to save it.

Oscar Wilde would have called this “the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass”.

Jordan Peterson’s must-watch takedown of SJW media maven Cathy Newman has gone viral, with over 2 million views on YouTube.

If you haven’t read my previous piece on the interview, shame on you! At least watch at least a few minutes of the video to get a sense of the totality of Peterson’s triumph.

Now, predictably, the left-wing media is trying to reframe Newman’s abject humiliation as a case of misogynist bullying by the “alt-right.” The aim, of course, is to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by implying that anyone who takes the side of Newman’s critics is anti-women and pro-abuse.

Now my attempts to moderate the discussion surrounding the channel 4 interview with are being used as proof that she is a victim. Is this how you want this to go, Cathy @cathynewman ? Are you going to stand forth as a victim?

Channel 4 News has called in security specialists to analyse threats made to presenter Cathy Newman following her interview with a controversial Canadian psychologist who has attracted a following among the “alt-right.”

Ben de Pear, the editor of Channel 4 News, said Newman had been subjected to “vicious misogynistic abuse”. Having to call in security specialists was a “terrible indictment of the times we live in”, he said.

“Security specialists.” Really? Speaking as a Channel 4 shareholder — as I guess all British subjects are, being as the channel is publicly owned — I’d be interested to see how solid the evidence is to warrant these drastic and presumably costly measures.

If you haven’t already, you absolutely must watch the encounter between SJW media maven Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News and free-speech-defending Canadian academic Jordan Peterson.

“I don’t think I have ever witnessed an interview that is more catastrophic for the interviewer,” says Douglas Murray.

He’s right.

If you loathe the cant, self-righteousness, and stupidity of the regressive left, then you’ll love this train wreck of an interview. It’s the most satisfying piece of poetic justice since the Comet came unstuck in that tunnel in Atlas Shrugged.

But this interview, I believe, is much more than just a conservative “lol and share” moment. I think it marks a pivotal victory in the culture wars — an incident in which the weaknesses of the regressive left have never been more cruelly or damningly exposed. So I want to examine in more detail why.

This week I want to put the boot in to Gogglebox (Channel 4, Fridays). Not the mostly likeable, everyday version, whose stars include our very own and much-loved Dear Mary, where ordinary-ish people are filmed reacting amusingly to the week’s TV. I mean the recent celebrity special, featuring former Oasis singer Liam Gallagher, a cricketer, a footballer, Ed Sheeran, Ozzie and Sharon Osbourne, the actress formerly known as Jessica Stevenson and Jeremy Corbyn.

The last couple were filmed together sitting on a yellow sofa at a smart-looking terrace address in Edinburgh. No explanation was given as to what the leader of the Labour party was doing with the former star of Spaced — Jessica Hynes, as she’s now known. Perhaps the producers were hoping we’d go: ‘Oh, how nice. Two old, old mates, probably, hanging out, as you do.’ But to me it all seemed very rum.

Corbyn didn’t exactly help himself. Though he’s clearly had a lot of media training in the past year — his dress is snappier, he’s less tetchy and defensive — he still comes across like an early-model replicant where the programmer couldn’t quite get the ‘normal’ function right.

No, The State (Channel 4) wasn’t a recruiting manual for the Islamic State, though I did feel uneasy about it throughout the four episodes. The fundamental problem is this: if you’re going to make a watchable drama about bad people doing terrible things, you inevitably have to humanise them. And from there it’s just a short step to making them sympathetic.

Peter Kosminsky’s drama followed four British Muslims to Syria to join IS. Shakira, a black convert with a nearly-ten-year-old son, wanted to apply her skills as a doctor; Ushna was a teenager seeking to be a ‘lioness for lions’; Ziyaad was an amiable lunk looking for adventure; and his mate Jalal was a ‘hafiz’ — someone who has memorised the entire Koran — who wanted to follow in the footsteps of his dead brother and witness the Sharia in its purest form.

Needless to say, each was horribly, brutally disabused. But already you see the problem: here were some quite likeable characters — kind, sensitive Jalal, especially — a million miles from the hopped-up, insensate, savage killers we now see roughly once a fortnight bombing, shooting, slashing, van-murdering innocents for the crime of living a normal western life.

Milo Yiannopoulos has been banned from speaking at his old school, Simon Langton grammar in Kent.

Not by the teachers – who were naturally eager to hear his views on Donald Trump, free speech and the alt right (quite topical at the moment…). Not by the children, more than 200 of whom had already signed up to hear his talk. But by a hitherto unknown section of Britain’s Department of Education called the “counter-extremism task force.”

So secretive is this “counter-extremism task force” that it is now denying responsibility for the ban which it effected.

Here’s the weaselly statement issued by the Department of Education:

When concerns are raised by members of the public following media coverage in advance of an event, the department would contact the school as a matter of routine to check they had considered any potential issues. The decision to cancel the event was a matter for the school.

Hmm. That isn’t what the teachers are saying. They wanted Milo to come, apparently, but were overruled by this mystery section of a government ministry which presumably – to judge by its name – was established mainly to protect children from dangerous terrorists.

It’s true that Milo does advertise himself as “dangerous”. But he is using the term ironically in order to mock the hypocrisy and hysteria of the regressive left – and its ludicrous belief that anyone who doesn’t share its political outlook must therefore be a fascist and a menace to society.

The real problem the liberal-left has with Milo – and I entirely understand this fear – is that he is so eloquent, charming, well-informed and articulate. They cannot rebut his arguments so instead they demonise him.

His recent encounter with Channel 4 newsreader Cathy Newman is a case in point. For the last few days, Cathy – an ardent feminist – has been crowing about all the tweets she has been sent congratulating her on having performed so well against this terrible person.

Channel 4’s What British Muslims Really Think will come as no surprise to the British public, says James Delingpole.

‘Our findings will shock many people,’ promised Trevor Phillips at the beginning of What British Muslims Really Think (Channel 4, Wednesday).

But the depressing thing is that I doubt they will, actually. I think the general British public have known for some time what Phillips’s documentary professed to find surprising: that large numbers of Muslims don’t want to integrate, that their views aren’t remotely enlightened, and that more than a few of them sympathise with terrorism. It’s only the establishment elite that has ever pretended otherwise.

As former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Phillips was very much part of that elite. He commissioned the 1997 Runnymede report that popularised the word ‘Islamophobia’. The fact that so impeccably liberal a figure is now issuing a mea culpa like this speaks volumes about how dire the situation has grown. ‘Everyone who has pinned their hopes on the rise of reforming and liberal British Muslim voices are in for a disappointment,’ said Phillips. ‘These voices are nowhere near as numerous as they need to be to make an impact.

Here are the stats to prove it: 52 per cent of Britain’s three million Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal; 39 per cent think a woman should always obey her husband; 18 per cent sympathise with people who take part in violence against those who mock the Prophet; 4 per cent — that equates to about 100,000 Muslims — have ‘sympathy for people who take part in suicide bombing to fight injustice’. Oh, and if any of them knew someone was involved in supporting terrorism in Syria, just one in three would report it to the police. The other two million, then, would keep schtum.

Normally the PC response to these surveys is to shoot the messenger, as the BBC and the Guardian and the usual dhimmi apologists did last year, when the Sun revealed that one in four British Muslims sympathised with the motives of the Charlie Hebdo killers. They’ll find it harder this time, not just because Phillips is black and probably reads the Guardian, but also because the survey was so thorough. It was conducted, face to face, by people of the same religion. And when it came to the really tricky question — the one about terrorism — a blank envelope was provided for the answer, so that respondents felt freer to say what they really thought.

In a Channel 4 documentary called What Britain’s Muslims Really Think, presenter Trevor Phillips presented survey evidence suggesting that large numbers of British Muslims don’t want to integrate and dislike Jews and that many thousands of them support extremist views including terrorism and suicide bombing.

The British Muslim community has responded in the usual way…

Smear the polling company

“Lets not forget ICM is one of the polling companies that wrongly predicted the 2015 general election. The stats just don’t hold enough weight.” (Nazia, 35, W. Yorkshire)

Cast doubt on the methodology

“Other issues include the fact that the study targeted areas that were at least 20% Muslim and a large chunk of the sample were born abroad. If the study was conducted where English is not widely spoken, how do we know the participants fully understood what they were being asked?” (Nazia, 35, W. Yorkshire)

Hint that even asking these questions is divisive and Islamophobic

What is going to happen to our stated desire to build robust social cohesion if we keep singling out British Muslims as unique special cases? And what is it that is really underlying such constant scrutiny? (Rachel Shabi, Al Jazeera)

Nothing to do with Islam. It’s ‘cultural’, innit?

Moreover, Trevor Philips and the show portrayed segregated schools as an Islamic problem, that somehow where a school finds itself admitting children of a certain colour, that it is a religious issue. I would argue that this is a cultural and geographical issue and conflating religion with state school segregation is ridiculous. (Ibraham Ilyas, 18, Birmingham)

There’s no such thing as a ‘Muslim’

Being a Shia Muslim I wish Wahhabi or Salafi elements of society weren’t able to answer on my behalf. (Zaynab Mirza, 32, London)